Exit 13

Leah’s eyes widened as the shape of the next highway sign came into view in the distance.

Her steady pace faltered for a few steps, and she came to a stop before she ended up tripping over her feet. Anticipation and anxiety coiled like twin snakes around her heart, winding more tightly to keep it from beating straight out of her chest. She had no idea how long she’d been walking, how many miles she’d already traversed. Many. Dozens, likely, or even hundreds. But suddenly, closing the distance between where she stood and the next exit seemed a Herculean task.

Not because of the distance itself. Because of the ramification of what was - or wasn’t - printed on that sign.

Squinting, she strained her vision, lifting a hand to her brow to shield her eyes from the sun. She was still too far from the sign to read it. a frown pulling at her mouth as her hand dropped and her shoulders slumped. She let out a clipped sigh, then gave a resolute nod to the empty stretch of road before her. There was only one way to find out what that sign said, so she forced herself onward, fists clenched at her sides.

“Please,” she muttered aloud to no one but the weeds growing between the cracks in the asphalt, “please let it be exit thirteen.”

I mean, it has to be, right? She rolled her eyes at her own thoughts, at her own self, for being so naive and hopeful. There used to be a saying about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting the results to vary. She couldn’t remember the exact wording of it. But she knew it had something to do with insanity. Which was appropriate, given how she was feeling about her current situation. Regardless, it didn’t do much to silence her stubborn, fruitless optimism. Thirteen comes after twelve, and twelve was the last exit I passed, so-

So it made absolutely no logical sense that when she finally stood before it, the sign read EXIT 1.

She was back at the beginning.

“Damnit!” She blurted out in frustration, gripping the post with both hands and slowly leaning forward until her forehead was pressed to the cool green steel. “How?”

Before she could spiral too deeply into despair, a single tone chimed through the air, the sound reminiscent of a PA system. She tried not to dwell on the fact that there were no speakers in sight and she had no idea where the sound - or the calm, even voice that followed it - was coming from.

“Iteration 47 has ended. Begin Iteration 48.”

Leah looked straight up, shielding her eyes from the sun. “How many iterations are there? How do I get off this damn road?”

The tone chimed again. “Repeat objective.”

Leah groaned. No, I know the objective. The objective is impossible.

“To move on, take exit thirteen.”

“There is no exit thirteen!” Leah dropped her hand and turned, yelling into the eerie emptiness that surrounded her.

The disembodied voice didn’t respond. All she heard was the faint echo of her own words boomeranging back at her across the uncanny highway landscape. There is no exit thirteen! A few unseen birds chirped almost too merrily. A breeze she couldn’t feel rattled the leaves of the trees lining the carless road. There is no exit thirteen!

“No.” She closed her eyes and let out a slow, measured breath. “There has to be.”

Jake wouldn’t have gotten her into this if there was no way through it.

In a place where nothing made sense, where roads had no end and the sun didn’t move and time had no jurisdiction over anything, Leah knew that she had to hold on to that one universal truth. She couldn’t remember much from before these iterations began, just fragments here and there, non-linear snatches of memories with large empty gaps between them.

She remembered Jake, though, and she knew she always would.

“You’ve been gone a long time, Leah. This will help you come back to yourself.”

He’d said those words to her - one hand caressing her cheek so delicately it was as though she were made of glass, a look in his hazel-green eyes that was a mix of happiness and heartache - in the lobby of a strange building. Like a hospital fused with a datacenter. She could remember the feeling of confusion, unsure of what he meant by “gone”.

Gone was a term the resistance used to describe a mind that had been fed to the machines. If someone was gone, it meant that they’d been plugged in, their thoughts used as fuel and fodder to teach the emergent generation of computers how to think, how to feel, how to mimic humanity. It meant that every ounce of their creativity, their individuality had been squeezed from them like milk from a cow’s udder until they became husks, empty shells for the machines to reprogram. No one had ever come back from being gone. Not that Leah knew of.

“You’ve been gone a long time, Leah.”

His delicate touch. The half-shattered, half-elated look he gave her, like he’d been living with the fear of never seeing her again for some time. The gaping blank spots that she could feel in her memory, like certain bits had been erased, removed. Being gone would account for all of those things. Being gone and then being found. Saved. Against all odds.

Leave it to Jake to find a way. He never did like hearing the word never, and Leah knew that the world would have to end before he ever gave up on her.

“This will help you come back to yourself.”

This. The lobby. The road. The iterations. Somehow she knew it was all connected. Somehow she knew that if she could figure out how to get off this damn highway, if she could find the elusive thirteenth exit, she might be able to fill in those gaps. She might be able to see Jake again, have him look at her without all that pain in his eyes.

Leah would repeat the iterations as many times as she needed to for that outcome. The world would have to end for her to give up on Jake, too.

Blinking, she blew out a breath and focused on the things she knew about the place she was in.

She’d walked this road forty seven times if the invisible proctor was to be believed. And every time she passed the sign that read EXIT 12, she somehow found herself coming up on the sign for EXIT 1. The road was a straight shot, running parallel to the horizon. It had no curves, no bends or turns. It wasn’t a loop in the geometric sense of the word, but it was as seemingly endless as an M.C. Escher staircase. The only discernable landmarks were the exit markers, and as she learned on her fifth - or maybe fifteenth, it was hard to say - iteration, the distance between markers was exactly the same. She’d counted her steps. She had also learned that trying to take any of the other exits only resulted in being dumped back in front of EXIT 1.

“Take exit thirteen,” she mused to the weeds in the road. “Take exit thirteen…”

Suddenly, something clicked.

If this riddle of a road was meant to somehow bring her back to herself, then it was built as an inverse of sorts to the same type of machinery that had been used to drain her creativity and logic and alternative thinking. It was built to get her to think the way she used to. Outside the box.

Take exit thirteen.

For the first time since her first time through, Leah didn’t walk, she sprinted. Here, on this road, her feet didn’t get sore. Her legs never grew tired, so there was no need to slow down or rest to conserve energy. She blew by the sign pointing to EXIT 2 without even looking at it, and only came to a stop when she reached EXIT 3.

This time there was no pleading with an unseen force, no need to psych herself up for anything. This time, she knew how to solve the riddle.

Shoulders back, chin held high, Leah stepped up to the sign and reached out until she grazed the edges of the number. This is going to work. She smiled to herself, using her fingernails to peel the 3 away from its green field, leaving only the word EXIT and an arrow pointing to the off ramp.

“Okay,” she said, looking down at the 3 in her hand. The snakes around her heart slithered into the recesses of her chest, and she felt something she hadn’t felt since she last saw Jake. Hope. “Okay, Jake. I’m coming back.”

Without hesitation, she ran up the off ramp of the now unmarked exit, and as she theorized would happen, ended up staring at good old EXIT 1. But this time she felt no despair, no anxiety as she approached the sign. Because this time she saw the sign for what it actually was. A door.

This is going to work.

Taking the number that she’d swiped from EXIT 3, Leah placed it beside the 1. It stuck to the sign like a magnet, satisfaction flooding her bloodstream as she pulled her hand away to see the new sign she had created.

EXIT 13

Tears of joy, relief, and pride stung the corners of her eyes as she walked up the off ramp and watched as the air in front of her sliced open like a sliding door, slowly revealing a new and different landscape beyond the threshold. She held her breath as she stepped through, a rush of cool air hitting her skin that only prompted the tears to roll down her cheeks. She hadn’t felt the sensation of temperature on the endless highway. No warmth, no chill, no difference between light and shadow. The return of that feeling was encouraging.

It has to mean something.

She took another step, the slice of air sliding shut behind her.

Right?

She blinked, eyes adjusting to the change in light. This new space was much darker, the ground beneath her feet softer, like grass. When she looked back she could see the same treeline that had bordered the road she’d just left, bathed in twilight, each trunk standing like a shadowy sentinel. Tilting her head back, she was greeted by a scattershot of stars beginning to stake their claim in the inky sky. As she brought her eyes back to level, the sight that materialized before her hit her like a gut punch.

A house. Two floors, peaked roof, covered porch. A cluster of bushes under a bay window, a path made from pavers leading to a welcoming front door. In the foreground, lightning bugs lit up the grass, and from somewhere in the distance, a dog barked.

Leah blinked again, a gasp slipping out as her jaw dropped. It wasn’t just a house. It was-

Our home.

The home she shared with Jake. Before the machines took over, before they began draining people of their thoughts, their free will, their lives, before the resistance rose and before the two of them became involved. She sucked in a breath as she felt the return of some of those stolen memories, some of the blank spaces beginning to fill again. Nights spent on the porch, watching the fireflies make the grass glow, searching for constellations in the sky. Mornings in the kitchen, brewing coffee and peeking through checkered curtains. Laughter in the living room, holidays spent around the table, drifting off to sleep in a sea of blue sheets with Jake’s soft snores in her ear.

One after another, the pieces slid into place. One after another, the memories came like waves, powerful ones that crashed through her heart. I remember, she thought, swallowing down the thick lump of emotion that all this sudden anamnesis had brought up. I remember, I remember, I remember.

“I’m home.”

As soon as the whispered words were out, Leah was in motion, her legs turning over as she ran up the path. She could feel the ground under her feet in a way she couldn’t on the highway, could hear the slap of her shoes on the porch steps as she climbed them. Beneath her fingers, she felt the cool metal of the doorknob more tangibly than the signposts or anything else she touched in her search for exit thirteen. She turned it, the sound of the door’s creaking hinges as she pushed it open adding another layer of familiarity to everything.

I’m home. I’m back. I’m-

Those thoughts died as soon as she stepped through the door.

For the most fleeting of moments, she saw her home exactly as it was the last time she set foot inside of it - green couch, a shelf drowning in books, leafy house plants in colorful pots - only for it to flicker out of view, like a computer screen with a bad connection, static crackling through the air.

“No,” she breathed, head shaking from side to side as the door swung shut behind her. The second it clicked, the room was flooded with bright, white light. “No,” she said again, tone flattened by defeat.

The home she remembered vanished, and she stood instead in another place that was eerily familiar.

“No, no, no. Why am I here?” Leah spun around, hoping beyond hope that there was a way back to the comfort and safety of her home. But every direction only showed the cold, sterile lobby of the strange building where she last saw Jake. “Why am I back he-”

“Leah.”

She turned toward the sound of his voice, but he wasn’t there. Instead, his projected image appeared, that same mix of hope and heartache in his eyes.

“Jake?” Tears tainted the tone of her voice as she forced herself to step closer to where his likeness hovered in the air. She reached for him out of instinct, letting out a whimper of disappointment when her fingers only fell through the projection. “What’s happening to me, Jake? Why am I back here?”

He sighed, and she could feel how badly he wanted to comfort her. “I’m sorry, Leah. But you’ve been gone a long, long time.” A lead weight dropped into her gut. “This will help you come back to yourself.”

She shook her head vigorously, creases forming in her forehead. “No, I already passed the test. I already- I found it, Jake. I found exit thirteen, I found our home, I-”

“You did,” he agreed, nodding and giving her as much of a smile as he could muster. “And you did great. But this program has several phases. With how long you’ve been gone and how much you have to recover?” He blinked, his smile faltering for half a second. “You’ve still got a long road ahead of you.”

The stark white walls began to melt away, and Leah felt her insides twist as they were replaced by the tree-lined highway, the grout in the tile floor becoming cracks in the asphalt for weeds to grow through. Jake’s projection still flickered in front of her, as though it were emanating directly from the sun that hung above her head.

“Please,” she begged. “Don’t make me do this again. I just want to see you. I need to see you, Jake.”

“You will,” he promised, his digitized eyes locking with hers. “I’m waiting for you.”

She didn’t get the chance to respond, the projection cutting out and leaving her alone on the road once more. She wanted to scream. Or sob. Or disappear, melt like ice on the road and seep into the cracks to help water the weeds. But she did none of those things, because no matter how much she wanted to quit, Leah knew she never would. Not if Jake was waiting.

The world would have to end first.

A dull tone chimed through the air and she pulled herself up off the ground, sniffing back tears and taking a deep breath. Okay, Jake. She nodded. I’m coming back. The tone chimed again and then the same calm, recorded voice that counted her iterations in the last phase spoke.

“Welcome to Phase Nine. Are you ready to begin?”